Posts Tagged ‘Green Party’

I have spent the day surrounded by sheeples (really people, there’s a double door at the entrance to the train station – you don’t need to line up 40 deep in order to get inside and don’t yell at me for skipping the line when I go to open the other door) and my boobs hurt. A lot.

Just to let you know where I am right now.

One of the things I’ve been hearing a lot in the media is that there’s some idea of election exhaustion here in Canada. Not only are we approaching our 3rd election in 4 years, for the last year, we’ve been his with the US primaries and now the US election.

Amy over at BlogHers ACT Canada asks why we’re going to the polls – again and notes the National Post quotes the Prime Minister as saying “this Parliament at its useful end.” Yeah, the PM isn’t getting his way. I’ll agree with that.

I’d also say that the election would have happened anyways, and in short order. I have to give some props to Stephen Harper for at least attempting to talk to the leaders of the other parties to get some sort of agreement. If Parliament had been recalled, eventually, the Conservative government would have been subjected to a confidence vote, and we’d be in the same place we are now.

Except that it’d be that much closer to Christmas – just like last time. When elections are close to major holidays, there is a decrease in the number of votes cast – which means fewer people have a say.

At any rate, I’m not going to discuss the party platforms here. I linked all the parties on this post and they’re linked on Amy’s post noted above. I’ll leave it to you to read the platforms yourself and figure out how you’re going to vote on your own.

Why don’t I care how you vote? Because of that nasty first past the post/concentration of votes in ridings thing I mentioned in an earlier post. I flip my vote all the time – I have voted Conservative, Liberal, NDP and once, even, the Marijuana Party (and then I got smart about one-issue parties. And stopped smoking pot).

So I flip my vote depending on the issues of the day. And here’s the thing: often, its the party with the most grass-roots issues that gets my vote. I guess I tend towards the grassroots side.

My dad didn’t vote for many years. He was jaded, disillusioned. And then in the last election, he registered to vote because he didn’t want the Conservatives to form a government. And that’s as good a reason as any.

The problem is, in democratic countries, we take the right to vote for granted. Ask anyone from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus or any of the other former Soviet countries – its not a given. Do not take it for granted.

Instead, see it as the blessing it is, and exercise that right, regardless of your degree of election exhaustion.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

Current Leader: Elizabeth May
Place on the spectrum: probably left of centre
Key policy categories: ecological wisdom, non-violence, social justice, participatory democracy, sustainability, respect for diversity.

Author’s Note: although the Green Party has never had an elected member of Parliament, they command a significant number of votes (but not in sufficient concentration to get a seat). Recently, a member of the Liberal party joined the Greens.

Current leader: Stephane Dion
Place on the spectrum: fluctuates; slightly left or right of centre depending on leadership and the issues of the day.
Key Policy categories: vaguely: leadership, economy, green shift (I think – that’s all I could find on the website)

Current leader: Gilles Duceppe
Place on the spectrum: Left of centre? Generally they’re viewed as a one-issue party, but share some values with social democrats.
Key policy categories: generally put, they have a history of wanting sovereignty/independence for the province of Quebec; they stand for defending the history, points of view, rights and interests of Quebec and its residents.

Author’s note: The BQ doesn’t matter so much in terms of actually forming a government; they only campaign in Quebec so as I noted in the previous post the highest number of seats they could get is 75. However if they won all those seats, they could become the Official Opposition. More on this later.

So wow. That’s a bit of a clusterfuck isn’t it?

2. How did we get here?

For a long time, we trundled along quite merrily with two parties: Liberal and Conservative (note, these are the only two parties who have ever formed governments). In the 1950s, a group in the praries started a merge of the Canadian Labour Congress and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation; they became The New Party. Their grassroots attitude gathered enough votes to help force Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals into a minority government situation. They moved the motion that brought down Joe Clark’s Conservative government and later on supported Trudeau in bringing the Constitution home.

And we trundled along, again quite merrily for a number of years with 3 parties.

In 1986, there was a little conference in Vancouver on Canada’s Economic and Political Future. The next year, the Reform Party was launched as a voice for Western Canada. Like the NDP, they were grassroots and populist, but sat somewhat more right of centre than the conservatives.

In 1991, the Bloc Quebecois was formed as a response to the failure of Ottawa to deal with Quebecois identity (See: Meech Lake). They run only in Quebec.

(There is a point to this)

Following the failure of the Charlottetown Accord in 1992, the 1993 elections marked a turning point in Canadian politics. The Tories (Conservatives) imploded and exploded simultaneously under Kim Campbell, especially after the Chretien attack ads. They went from 169 seats down to 2.

At the same time, the Reform Party gained 52 seats, 51 of which were in the west, and the Bloc Quebecois (running only in Quebec) gained 54. The Liberals under Jean Chretien won 177 seats. 9 seats went to the NDP.

Under Canadian law, the party with the most seats after the party that forms a majority government becomes Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. But what do you do when a party that only represents one province wins the required number of seats, especially when its only 2 seats more than the third-place party?

Well, you invite the leader of the third-place party to live in Stornoway (residence of the leader of the official opposition), but you make the second-place party the official opposition (loyal is another matter entirely). This is a typically Canadian response to such a situation. By and large, the Reform party was allowed as much time during question period as the BQ and received almost similar funding.

What happened was Ottawa sat up and took notice, not only of Quebec, but of the idea that the West Wanted In. The technical term for the split is regionalism.

In 1997, Reform became the Official Opposition. In 2000, Reform was disbanded and became the Canadian Alliance; in 2003, the Canadian Alliance merged with the Conservative Party to become Canada’s New Conservatives. Stephen Harper was elected leader in 2004, and formed a minority government in 2006.

Meanwhile, the Liberals had been plagued with issues of their own. Long-time leader Jean Chretien resigned from politics; his successor was Paul Martin, the former Minister of Finance – somewhat popular, but he was under pressure from the federal Sponsorship Scandal. The Liberals formed a minority government in 2004, and were forced to water down their speech from the throne in order to stay in power. On November 28, 2005, the Liberals lost key support from the NDP and the government fell. The Governor General issued election writs for January 23, 2006.

Martin resigned party leadership shortly after, and Stephane Dion became the new leader after winning against Michael Ignatieff in a run-off ballot.

Author’s Opinion: Why the minority Liberal and Conservative governments? I think its simpler than people realize. Canadians were sick of scandal and gave Martin a chance to revamp the party. All of the other parties had reworked themselves and gotten rid of the old guard. The Liberal party did not do that, and has not done that – Dion is still a member of the old guard. The Liberals would do well to have a different leadership.